QUICHI

Dozens of members of Hezbollah have been seriously wounded in Lebanon and Syria with eight confirmed deaths after pagers used to communicate exploded.

More than 2,750 people are reported to have been injured in southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, and in the Syrian town of Set Zaynab, as the devices were simultaneously detonated.

In a statement, the militant group confirmed that a girl and two men were killed in the blast.

Lebanon’s health minister Firass Abiad then said five more people have died, with the son of Ali Ammar, Hezbollah member of the Lebanese parliament, confirmed to be one of those killed. At least 200 others remain in critical condition.

A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the ‘biggest security breach’ the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, is among injured by the explosion, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported.

Local media reported that he has been hospitalised with injuries that are not life-threatening in the aftermath of the explosion.

‘Amani has a superficial injury and is currently under observation in a hospital,’ Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported.’

Lebanon’s Health Ministry has called on hospitals to be on maximum alert for all the casualties they are expected to receive.

It also urged its citizens to dispose of pagers immediately amid the coordinated attack.

CCTV footage circulating on social media shows some of the blasts – at the till of a supermarket and on the street.

In one harrowing video from a fruit and vegetables market, the backpack of a man is seen blowing up as shoppers flee for their lives.

In the moments after the blast, he is seen laying on the floor motionless as a man is seen leaning over to check on him.

Ambulances have been deployed to the sites of explosions across the southern suburbs of Beirut to help those injured.

It is understood that victims have been hospitalised with various injuries – from a number of fingers blown off, hands ruptures, and wounds to their eye sockets.

At Mt. Lebanon hospital, a Reuters reporter saw motorcycles rushing to the emergency room, where people with their hands bloodied were screaming in pain.

The head of the Nabatieh public hospital in the south of Lebanon, Hassan Wazni, said that around 40 wounded people were being treated at his facility.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese Red Cross said that more than 50 ambulances and 300 emergency medical staff were dispatched to assist in the evacuation of victims.

The wave of explosions lasted around an hour after the initial detonations, which took place about 3.45pm local time.

It was not immediately clear how the devices were detonated, but a number of theories have been getting traction online.

Former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reacted to the news: ‘Regarding the reports of beepers being remotely detonated in Beirut today, I genuinely hope it is a supply-chain attack. Because the alternative is simply unthinkable.’

The attack has been widely attributed to a hacking operation of Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has said it will not be commenting on the reported explosions in Lebanon.

Got a story? Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk. Or you can submit your videos and pictures here.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

Follow Metro.co.uk on Twitter and Facebook for the latest news updates. You can now also get Metro.co.uk articles sent straight to your device. Sign up for our daily push alerts here.

Vladimir Putin’s forces have executed a Ukrainian prisoner of war (PoW) with a sword, it has been alleged.

A photograph shared on Telegram apparently shows the medieval-style murder of a soldier by Russia.

His body was found laying in a pool of blood with a sword rupturing his chest and the inscription ‘For Kursk’, suggesting he was killed as revenge for the Ukrainian counterattack into Russia’s border region.

Remnants of gray tape are visible on the soldier’s hand, while burnt out military vehicles are seen in the background.

Metro.co.uk has chosen not to publish the photograph because of how graphic it is.

The alleged execution happened in the eastern Ukrainian town of Novohrodivka, in the region of Donetsk.

Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, said: ‘The Russians executed an unarmed Ukrainian prisoner of war with a sword.

‘Нis hands were bound with tape. Such actions constitute a violation of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War.’

The Prosecutor General’s Office confirmed that an investigation has been opened into the Telegram post.

‘Footage of an alleged execution, with a sword, of an unarmed Ukrainian soldier with taped hands is spreading on the web. Preliminarily, the crime was committed in Novohrodivka, Donetsk region,’ prosecutor general Andriy Kostin said on X.

A blurred image posted alongside his post and his office’s statement showed the bloodied body in military fatigues.

Kostin said this month that Ukraine was investigating alleged executions of 73 Ukrainian prisoners.

In June, Ukraine opened an investigation of the suspected beheading of one of its servicemen by Russian forces.

The alleged execution comes as Russian forces continue to battle Ukrainian troops in Kursk ever since August 6 – which turned out to be the biggest foreign attack on Russian soil since World War Two.

Ukraine says its forces control about 100 villages in the region over an area of 500 square miles, which the Kremlin disputes.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking in his nightly video address on Monday, said the incursion had slowed down Putin’s forces in the east, particularly on the rail and logistic hub of Pokrovsk.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

A man accused of being one the worst sexual predators in French history has claimed in court he did rape his wife and allowed multiple strangers to attack her.

Dominique Pélicot, 71, spoke for the first time about his alleged crimes, saying: ‘I recognise the facts in their totality.’

The white haired grandfather was appearing in the dock at the Vaucluse Criminal Court, in Avignon, following a week of ill health.

He is on trial alongside 50 other men, all of them accused of the ‘aggravated rape’ of his wife Gisèle, also 71.

She looked on impassively today at Pélicot shuffled into court using a cane to support himself, before owning up to crimes that had seen his own daughter describe him as ‘one of the greatest sexual predators’ of recent years.

In a shocking statement, Pélicot admitted: ‘Today, I maintain that, with the obligations we all have, I am a rapist, like everyone in this room. They cannot say otherwise.’

Pélicot also focused on alleged crimes he had allegedly suffered as a child, saying he was raped as a nine year old, and then forced to witness another sex attack when he was 14.

‘I remember nothing from my youth but shocks and traumas,’ said Pélicot, adding it changed when he met his wife as a teenager.

‘I was very happy with her,’ said Pélicot. ‘She was the opposite of my mother, who was completely rebellious. We had three children, and grandchildren, whom I never touched.’

He said Gisèle – from whom he has now divorced – ‘did not deserve this.’

Pélicot has been on remand since 2020, when he was first arrested on suspicion of drugging and then raping Gisèle, while inviting men he contacted on line to do the same.

Pélicot is facing a jail sentence of up to 20 years, along with all the other defendants.

Last week, psychologists described Pélicot as a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ character who appeared like a normal husband during the day, and then drugged his wife so strangers could rape her at night.

Pélicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, 46, last week told the court that he was ‘one of the greatest sexual predators’ of recent years.

She said he secretely photographed her in the nude, along with her two sister-in-laws.

This was at the same family home in Mazan, some 20 miles from Avignon, which Pélicot had invited the alleged rapists.

Pélicot was first arrested in September 2020 for secretely filming up women’s skirts at a supermarket in Carpentras.

His devices were searched, and there were hundreds of pornographic videos and photos of women.

It was while in custody that Mr Pélicot reported a hard drive, hidden under a printer, which contained a file called ‘Abuses’.

It classified the nickname and telephone numbers of attackers, together with some 3,800 photos and videos of Gisèle being raped between 2011 and 2020.

Detectives have listed a total of 92 rapes committed by 72 men, 51 of whom have been identified.

Pélicot sex ring involved advertising on a site for ‘partners’ on an online forum called ‘Without Her Knowing’ on the coco.fr site.

Of the 83 men involved, 51 aged between 26 and 73 were identified and arrested by the police.

Alleged rapists involved in the case include civil servants, ambulance workers, soldiers, prison guards, nurses, a journalist, a municipal councillor, and truck drivers.

In a separate case, Pélicot has been charged with raping and murdering a 23-year-old estate agent in Paris in 1991.

He has admitted one attempted rape in 1999, after DNA testing proved a case against him.

The Avignon aggravated rape case is due to last until December 21.

Fourteen of the other defendants have also admitted rape, while the rest deny any wrongdoing.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

This is the dramatic moment a fire crew stranded on the roof of their truck had to be rescued by a helicopter as Storm Boris continued to tear through the Czech Republic.

Footage showed the vehicle being overtaken by water in the town of Krnov, on the border with Poland, during what has been described as the flooding of the century.

The firefighters had been dispatched to help people affected by the floods when they became trapped themselves.

With the deluge of water continuing to rise and no safe route out, a helicopter was deployed to rescue them.

Hovering above the stranded crew, a team inside the aircraft lowered a harness, carefully lifting each firefighter from atop the truck’s roof.

Krnov was almost completely submerged on Sunday as its two rivers, Opava and Opavice, rose to record levels.

Police said the body of a woman was found in the water in the town, while two men drowned in the northeast of the Czech Republic.

Authorities declared an emergency in two northeastern regions, including in the Jeseniky mountains near the Polish border.

A number of towns and cities had been entirely submerged in the northeast, with thousands of residents evacuated.

Military helicopters joined rescuers on boats to transport people to safety in the wake of the storm.

Czech prime minister Petr Fiala visited the town of Jesenik, one of the hardest hit places.

‘The worst is behind us and now, we have to deal with all the damage,’ he said following the visit.

Waters were receding from the mountainous areas on Monday, leaving behind destroyed houses and bridges and damaged roads.

But the has rain resumed and is now expected to last until Wednesday in some areas.

Elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, the water has swamped parts of Austria, Poland and Romania as a low-pressure system crossing the region has unleashed record-high rains for days.

It is expected that the rainfall will affect Slovakia and Hungary later in the week.

So far 16 people have been reported killed – seven people in Romania, five in Poland, three in the Czech Republic and one in Austria.

In Poland, prime minister Donald Tusk held an emergency meeting and declared a disaster in flooded areas, a government measure to facilitate evacuation and rescues.

The flooding has burst dams and embankments while receding waters left streets covered in piles of debris and mud.

It prompted a hospital in the southwestern Polish city of Nysa to evacuate about 40 patients.

Schools and offices in the affected areas were closed Monday and drinking water and food were being delivered by trucks.

Many Polish cities, including Warsaw, have called for food donations for flood survivors.

Experts warned of flood threats due to the cresting Oder River in Opole, a city of some 130,000 residents, and Wroclaw, home to about 640,000 residents and where disastrous flooding happened in 1997.

Firefighters in southwestern Poland said flood victims included a surgeon whose body was found Monday morning in Nysa after he returned from hospital duty.

The bodies of two women and two other men have been found in other parts of the region.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

Vladimir Putin sent two of his nuclear submarines under the polar icecap in the Arctic as he completed the largest naval war exercise since the Cold War.

Putin showed off his firepower as he sent the Emperor Alexander III strategic ballistic nuclear submarine – capable of carrying Kalibr hypersonic atomic missiles – on a ‘subglacial march’.

It was accompanied by the Krasnoyarsk Yasen-M class nuclear-powered attack submarine on a route that ‘crossed six Arctic seas.’

The polar mission was done ‘to reinforce the Pacific Fleet in accordance with the Ocean-2024 strategic military exercise plan.’

Putin staged the Ocean-2024 war games – the largest since the Cold War – in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans, and the Mediterranean, Caspian and Baltic Seas.

A number of drills involved the Chinese navy in a sign of increased cooperation between the two countries.

Earlier, Putin sent two Tu-160 ‘White Swan’ strategic bombers on a mission to the north of the United Kingdom over the Norwegian Sea.

In other action, Marshal Ustinov and the Admiral Golovko warships of the Northern fleet trained for combat with ‘hostile warships’ in the Barents Sea.

More than 400 warships, submarines, and auxiliary fleet support vessels took part in the drills, as did 120-plus aircraft and helicopters from Russia’s naval aviation  and Aerospace Forces.

Some 90,000 military personnel took part, with 7,000 units of weapons, the largest exercise of its kind since 1985.

The aim was ‘to test the readiness of the leadership of the formations and units of the Russian Navy to control heterogeneous groupings of forces in their areas of responsibility.’

The war games simulated ‘combat actions’ to destroy vessels, aircraft and forces of a ‘mock enemy’.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

A British teenager has been left critically injured after an incident at a waterpark in the Spanish island of Mallorca.

It is understood that the boy, aged 15, almost drowned at one of the pools at the Hidropark in the northern town of Alcúdia earlier this afternoon.

Local media reported that he ‘had hit his head’ and was then rushed to hospital in critical condition.

Civil Guard motorcyclists drove in front of the ambulance to make sure he got to hospital in the quickest possible time.

Local newspaper Cronica Balear said the boy was ‘knocked unconscious when he went down one of the slides and hit his head.’

They reported: ‘The boy, as a result of the crash, has been knocked unconscious, and once he reached the pool, went to the bottom of it.’

It was also claimed that emergency services ‘began to revive the child’ at the site and that they ‘recovered his pulse’ but the he remained unconscious.

The victim has since been transferred to Son Espases Hospital after the incident at about 4pm today.

‘Quickly, lifeguards have rescued him from the water. In a few minutes, agents of the Local Police, Civil Guard, a medicalised ambulance of the SAMU 061, a rapid intervention vehicle (VIR) and a sanitarised ambulance from Falck have approached the scene,’ the report said.

‘Upon arrival, the health workers began to revive the child.

‘He has recovered his pulse, but he was still unconscious, so they have decided to activate the green alert to transfer him as quickly as possible in an ambulance to the University Hospital of Son Espases.

‘For this reason, SAMU 061 has contacted the Civil Guard and the Local Police so that they could facilitate the circulation of the ambulance.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

A construction worker was killed during the test ride of a rollercoaster at the site Germany’s Oktoberfest.

The incident happened just before 11am on Monday in the Bavarian capital of Munich, which hosts the annual beer festival.

It is understood that the man was hit on the head by a wagon – at full speed – and was left lying under the tracks of the ride, named Olympia Looping.

The victim – identified as a 20-year-old Romanian – suffered serious injuries in the incident, Bild reported.

Emergency services rushed to his aid and an ambulance drove him to a hospital, but he succumbed to his wounds an hour later.

Police have cordoned off the scene while an investigation into his death takes place.

German news agency DPA cited Peter Bausch, chairperson of the Munich Funfair Operator Association, as saying: ‘It is a tragic accident. That a young person has died is the most terrible thing.’

Funfair operator, Yvonne Heckl, said she has been in a state of shock in the hours after the man’s death.

She described what happened as ‘news that pulls the ground out from under your feet – a drama for the family, the operator and everyone else involved.’

The incident comes just days before Oktoberfest is set to kick off in Munich, on Saturday, September 21, until Sunday, October 6.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

Trump supporters have seized on details of a recent cover of TIME Magazine to claim it was somehow involved in yesterday’s apparent assassination attempt on the former president.

The White House hopeful was playing golf at his course in Florida on Sunday when a man allegedly poked an AK-47-style rifle through a fence around 300 to 500 yards away.

The latest issue of the New York-based current affairs magazine, published four days earlier, shows a mock-up of a distressed Trump in his golf buggy, stuck in a sand bunker on a generic golf course.

The image is captioned with the words ‘In Trouble’.

Prominent far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who recently joined Trump on the campaign trail, posted in reply to an X post of the TIME cover : ‘Coincidence? Or coordination?’

‘It’s a photo of Donald Trump on the golf course with the words “In Trouble”.

‘Did they have advance knowledge of the attempted assassination of President Trump today at his golf club in West Palm Beach FL?!’

Thousands of users have shared the post, including a number of other profiles with large profiles in the MAGA-sphere.

One claimed TIME ‘activated’ the would-be shooter by giving him a ‘a message and instructions’.

Another page with two million followers posted a slew of posts with unsubstantiated suggestions of a wider conspiracy behind the golf course incident.

They include a post of the TIME cover, linked to the other claims, captioned: ‘PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THIS IMAGE TIME MAGAZINE POSTED 4 DAYS AGO ON 9/11’.

Another conspiracy theorist posted to his 100,000 followers: ‘Trump Assassination Attempt No2 was PREDICTED By TIME Magazine cover! These are MIND-BLOWING connections!’

Loomer, 31, has actively promoted debunked claims that 9/11 was an inside job.

Among other campaign appearances, she was allowed to join Trump at Ground Zero for a memorial to the tragedy.

She later posted a screenshot of a CNN headline reporting that Trump’s decision to play golf was last-minute, saying : ‘Really makes you wonder how the shooter knew where President Trump would be!’

Titled ‘How Kamala Harris knocked Donald Trump off course,’ the cover story makes no reference to any attempts to assassinate Trump, past or future.

It discusses how Ms Harris was widely perceived to have beaten Trump in the recent televised debate and has a slight but consistent lead in the polls.

She had a 2.6-point lead in the latest average of national polls, collated by FiveThirtyEight, though one more recent poll put this at 4 points.

A 58-year-old North Carolina native, Ryan Wesley Routh, has been named as the suspect arrested in connection with the incident.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

Two Russian drone operators correctly predicted their deaths after their commander allegedly sent them on suicide mission for arguing with him.

In a video recorded before their deaths, the middle age men said they had been told to leave their drone squad and join an infantry platoon storming a Ukrainian position in occupied Donetsk

The footage, published posthumously, sees Dmitry ‘Goodwin’ Lysakovsky and Sergei ‘Ernest’ Gritsai accuse their new commander Igor Puzyk, of making the unusual order after a quarrel.

The pair had apparently been angry that their drone intelligence was wasted, which hadn’t gone down well with Puzyk.

They also claim that commander had facilitated drug trafficking in his unit and lied about battlefield gains under his command.

Lysakovsky says: ‘I’m leaving for an attack. If I come back fine, if I don’t then we’ll show you and explain to you [the reality].’

Lysakovsky recorded separate footage where he is alone and further criticises Puzyk, claiming commander was being influenced by a soldier who kept ties with Ukrainian intelligence.

He also discourages people from joining the Russian forces, saying: ‘Please, don’t serve in the ministry of defence… Your task is to die here so that the regiment commander, reporting to higher-ups, looks good. You are his personal serfs.’

On Sunday the Russian Defense Ministry confirmed the pair’s deaths, which happened during an assault on the village of Lisivka, on September 11.

Lisivka had previously been wrongly claimed by the Russians to have been ‘liberated’ but remained in Ukrainian hands.

In their joint footage, the two men said they complied with their commander’s orders because they had taken an ‘oath to the Motherland’.

The videos, which have been widely circulated on the Telegram social messaging app, are said to have angered the Russian defence ministry, which is trying to boost army recruitment numbers.

The men’s claims they had been sent on a suicide mission as a punishment also sparked outrage among military bloggers.

Some said they’d heard the soldiers were two of the best drone operators on the front line and sending them to almost certain death was self-sabotage.

Several said wasting valuable specialists on frontline assaults was becoming more and more common because of manpower shortages, reports Business Insider.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.